July 18, 2012, 1:42 PM — Fujitsu has produced a lot of first-rate subnotes over the years, but the Lifebook UH572 is a shaky start to its Ultrabook endeavors. While it looks good, boasts a nice webcam, and packs a roomy hard drive, this 13.3-inch portable disappoints on several fronts.
Although reasonably priced at $999 (as of July 5, 2012), the consumer sibling of the business-oriented Lifebook UH772 delivers decidedly subpar performance. Even with one of the new Ivy Bridge CPUsan Intel Core i5-3317U running at 1.7GHzthe UH572 did poorly in our WorldBench 7 test suite, turning in an overall score of 97. That's on the low end for notebooks in its ultraportable class, and likely reflects the unremarkable nature of the rest of its configuration: 4GB of memory, standard Intel HD4000 graphics, a 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
Performance
While the UH572 did okay on certain parts of the benchmarkstartup and content creation scores were on a par with other Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks we've seenit stumbled badly in the PCMark 7 Productivity Suite and storage components. I blame the pokey hard drive, which together with the HD4000 graphics--unassisted by a discrete GPU--probably also contributed to lackluster gaming scores as well.
Battery life was also unimpressive, clocking in at 4.5 hoursnot the worst we've seen but a couple of hours shy of the best performances. Factored in with the rest of the UH572's test scores, it produced an overall performance rating of 67; by way of comparison, the models on our current Ultrabook chart all scored in the high 70s or low to mid-80s.
Sleek Design
If industrial design contributed to the score, the Lifebook UH572 would have done better. From its brushed silver magnesium alloy cover to its smooth black interior with blue lighting accents, the UH572 looks like a class act. The case remains cool after several hours of operation, and the units 4.1-pound weight (including charger) is mid-range for the screen size.
The widescreen (1366 by 768 pixels), LED-backlit display is bright and crisp. The laptop supports Intel's Wi-Di technology for beaming a notebook display to a TV that also supports Wi-Di, but you need to plug in a Wi-Di adapter to use this feature.
